A fishing dilemma

LANSING — The age-old angler's quandary — whether it's better to leave biting fish in search of others or exploit them until your arms ache — confronted my fishing buddy Dave Patterson and me this week.

Neither of us having fished the Mississippi since last fall, we had no clue where the bass might lurk, so we motored upriver Wednesday through a brown-tinged labyrinth of running sloughs and backwater lakes searching for water a bit clearer than the rest.

Finding none, we finally stopped at a spot where Dave had caught bass in years past — a long point jutting into a swiftly flowing slough, providing, we hoped, enough relief from the current to attract and hold fish.

On any given day, the odds are long that we will catch many big bass. On Wednesday, in a vast pool of muddy water with no insights into recent fish movement and behavior, they seemed impossibly long.

And yet, we immediately overcame them at the first stop on our first 2017 visit to the river.

Dave's second cast with a crankbait yielded a 3-pound largemouth, and my fifth cast with a swim jig attracted its twin. After Dave caught a couple more similar fish with his crankbait, I switched lures and joined the fun.

On our first two brief passes along the underwater portion of the point, we boated 12 nice bass, both largemouth and smallmouth.

Dave, who gets more fun out of finding fish than catching them, then made his first mention of wanting to check some other spots.

Having never tired of arched rods and leaping bass, I replied only with a crestfallen expression intended to encourage at least a couple more passes through the eager bass.

At the end of our fourth pass we had run our total to 24 fish — at least half of them 3 pounds or better.

On one occasion, as I was playing a big bass, another fishing boat came idling down the slough, and Dave, wishing not to give away our spot, advised me not to land the fish until the boat had passed from sight.

While I stood there like nothing was happening, with my rod tip jerking violently, a big bass leapt from the water at the side of the boat. That's not my fish, I told Dave, who replied, 'I know. It's mine.' It was one of our six simultaneous catches.

After our fourth pass, Dave couldn't take it anymore, and we left the underwater point with the fish still biting in search of other fish.

'Anyone can catch fish when they're biting like that,' Dave told me later that evening without, mercifully, pointing me out as living proof of his statement.

'For me,' he said, 'the fun and challenge is finding them and getting them to bite.'

Having often benefited from his fish-finding skills during the past 40 years, I don't mind deferring to his judgment, even though I do prefer to make them quit biting before I leave.